Obama Is On The Path To Success In Syria Intervention

Whatever the twisted path, whether by design or accident, the Obama administration has ended up in a better place on Syria than looked possible even days ago. President Obama was wise to take up and begin to test the Russian offer to remove and possibly destroy Syria's arsenal of chemical weapons.

In fact, the offer has forced some clarity from a sometimes muddled U.S. foreign policy. For Obama to turn this situation into a foreign policy success, he will have to maintain that clarity.

There are three distinct arguments for intervention in Syria, which are sometimes mixed together in calls for action.

The first is regime change, which would require policies to help the rebels topple Bashar Assad's government.

The second is humanitarian, to do something to stop the enormous suffering there. The third is simply to underscore and enforce an international norm against the use of chemical weapons.

Obama has now firmly committed himself to the third — and only the third — objective. In his speech Tuesday, he rejected the first, explaining that the U.S. "cannot resolve someone else's civil war through force, particularly after a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan." His proposed military action would be even smaller in scale than the Libyan strikes, he noted, and thus would be unlikely to shift the balance of power much in Syria.

Obama's proposals are also not likely to reduce the humanitarian crisis. Even his most muscular proposals — airstrikes and aid to the rebels — would probably intensify the conflict and increase the number of people killed or displaced.

(Several studies of past military interventions, even as recently as from 2012, confirm this observation.)

Nearly all of the deaths in Syria have come through conventional weapons and, as Time magazine's Michael Crowley notes: "The images of children crippled by conventional bombs were sickening, too."

So, Obama's aim is solely to affirm an international norm. To this end, he already has achieved something important. He has mobilized world attention, and there is now a chance, albeit small, that he might get a process in place that monitors and even destroys Syrian chemical weapons.

Almost certainly he has ensured that such weapons won't be used again by the Assad regime. That's more than he could have achieved through airstrikes — which are unlikely to have destroyed such weapons. (Bombing chemical weapons facilities could easily release toxins into the atmosphere.) This is a significant success.

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